THE 



GEOLO&ICAL MAG^lZINE. 



NEW SERIES. DECADE II. VOL. I. 



No. VII.— JULY, 1874. 



I. — On the Dawn and Development of Life on the Eakth.^ 

 By Henry Woodward, F.E.S., F.G.S., of the British Museum. 



IN 'The East,' that wonderful cradle of the human race, towards 

 whose sunrise we turn to find the dawn at once of Civilization 

 and Eomance, Nature exhibits herself in all the exuberance of her 

 vitality, both of plant and animal. The summer and the rainy- 

 season unite, with no intervening period of spring and autumn. 

 Seasons, like days, spring suddenly into full-blown development. 

 Night is succeeded by day without dawn, and day by night without 

 the lingering hues of eve. 



What wonder, then, that our ideas of Creation, derived as they 

 undoubtedly Avere from Oriental tradition, should take the form of 

 the opening of subtropical life rather than of our more graduated 

 temperate zone ; or that we should read of man and all animate 

 creation springing suddenly into being from the rainy waste of 

 chaos, each and all fully developed, as we behold them to-day ! 



"Nothing was in being," say the old men of an Indian tribe. 

 " All was null and void ; there was no sky, no earth, no sea, no 

 shore ; suddenly seven warriors found themselves seated on the edge 

 of a lake, smoking the calumet of peace, and their wives were already 

 working in the wigwams." 



No legend can more vividly bring before us the notion that man 

 has passed his infancy as if in a dream. 



If for a moment we recall our own early recollections, we shall 

 generally find they carry us back to some event, or place, or person, 

 Avhich filled our dawning intelligence, to the exclusion of all else, 

 and beyond which we are unable to peer through the mist. 



Turning from the consideration of our own impressions, — which, 

 after the minutest self-investigation, would, unassisted by the guid- 

 ance of friends older than ourselves, simply land us at the same 

 conclusion arrived at by Topsy — " spect I growed," — let us learn 

 how far History traces back the ancestry of our race and the changes 

 of the world we dwell in. Alas ! written documents do not carry 

 us back more than thirty or forty centuries, whilst the most ancient 

 remains of edifices, built at any previous epoch, which also may be 

 called "archives of stone," date back perhaps 2000 years earlier; 



1 Being the substance of a lecture delivered before the Bradford Philosophical 

 Society, March 5th, 1873, and elsewhere. 



DECADE II. — VOL. 1. — NO. YII. 19 



